Quote

It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Often
Personalities
Felt
Partly
Hard
Fascinated
Writing
Drawn
People
Compare
Personality
Almost
Inhabit
Process
Neutral

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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
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Writing is the most solitary of arts.
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Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
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The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
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Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.
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Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
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Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
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I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
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... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
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Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
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I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.
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I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
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Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
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For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
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One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
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Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
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I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
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God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
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